Darren Ashley guilty of wife Kirsty’s murder

AFTER more than four years of uncertainty, a jury took less than three hours to deliver justice for Kirsty Ashley

Kirsty Ashley's mother Heather Steadman, left, is consoled outside the Supreme Court by family friend Samantha Warfe after the jury reached its guilty verdict on Friday

AFTER more than four years of uncertainty, a jury took less than three hours to deliver justice for Kirsty Ashley.

Her mother Heather Steadman and best friend Samantha Warfe were overcome with emotion as they hugged on the steps of the Supreme Court late on Friday, after Ms Ashley’s estranged husband, Darren Ashley, was found guilty of her 2012 murder.

After more than four years of uncertainty, a jury took less than three hours to deliver justice for Kirsty Ashley. Picture: Supplied

The retrial was the second time a jury had found Ashley guilty of murder after the Court of Criminal Appeal earlier this year quashed a 2014 verdict and ordered another trial in front of a fresh jury.

Ashley appeared emotionless in the dock as the verdict was read, continuing to jot down the obsessive notes he has taken for the duration of the trial.

Ms Steadman found her daughter’s body in a pool of blood at her son’s Lovegrove Dr, Alice Springs home, where Ms Ashley was staying after leaving her now-convicted husband.

“I’d just like to say that Darren did murder my daughter Kirsty but he didn’t have to. All he had to do was accept that she wanted to finish the relationship and my daughter would be alive and he would be free,” Ms Steadman said outside court.

“She was a wonderful person. She had a beautiful bright smile, a bright, bubbly personality and she was a really good friend for a lot of people.”

Ms Steadman said reliving the trauma of her daughter’s death in court was even more painful the second time around.

Darren Ashley on the day he was arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife, Kirsty. Picture: NT Police/NT Supreme Court

“We just need to work out how we’re going to live our lives,” she said. “Not move on, but learn to live again and accept that there’s always going to be a hole where Kirsty should be in our lives.”

Ms Warfe said her best friend was “a happy person, who was always there for you”.

Ashley now faces a mandatory life sentence, with a minimum 20-year non-parole period. During the trial, he took to the stand to give testimony, which at times bordered on farce. He claimed he was acting in self defence after Ms Ashley came at him with a knife, but that the fatal blow came when she “fell on a knife”.

Her body was found with two deep cuts to the throat among 27 knife wounds.

Jurors at one stage laughed at his unlikely testimony, in which he denied having worn gloves to the scene of the crime and said he left no fingerprints because his hands were almost entirely covered in band-aids.

Those close to the case considered it almost overwhelming in strength for the prosecution, despite there having been no confession or eyewitnesses.

The unanimous verdict was delivered after two hours and forty minutes.

His sentencing proceedings will be briefly mentioned on January 30.

Justice Dean Mildren said he would consider the unusual move of sentencing Ashley in Alice Springs, nearer to where the crime was committed and where Ms Steadman and many of Ms Ashley’s friends still live.